Hardware Accelerated Theora for Firefox Mobile, codenamed Fennec, on Nokia N900

Matthew Gregan, a Mozilla employee working on improving audio and video support in Firefox, posted a blog about enabling Full screen video playback on Firefox on Mobile, Fennec on Nokia N900 without hogging 100% CPU. This has been possible due to David's work on the Project Leonora, funded by Mozilla, to enable Theora decoding on a DSP - hardware accelerated Ogg Theora.

David Scheelf's job was to port Xiph's Theora codec on to the C64x+DSP(digital signal processor) found mostly in systems built upon Texas Instrument's OMAP3 family of processors, found in smarphones - Motorolla Droid, Nokia N900, Palm. Matthew says in his blog, "The intention of this project was to provide a high quality set of royalty free media codecs for a common mobile computing platform."

While trying to integrate this hardware accelerated Theora in Fennec, Gregan played a full screen 800x480 video in N900 under three different scenarios. Here are the results for just the video decoding.

Taking the video decoding load off CPU increases the battery life of the device significantly and makes it available for other real time tasks which wasn't possible earlier with more than 90% of the CPU busy in decoding. Since, Firefox for Mobile, codenamed Fennec, will adopt royalty free codecs to support HTML5 videos, just like the Desktop version, it was important for Firefox to find a way to provide comfortable video playback on the mobile browser. The best way Of-course was to do the video decoding on a DSP, giving rise to Project Leonora.

Although this hardware accelerated Theora codec hasn't been integrated completely in Fennec, its still good to see Firefox bringing open standards to mobile. And with project Leonora, Theora will probably be adopted by other mobile browsers and smarphones, giving a boost to Video experience on Mobile.